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Labs

Commotion Tech Lab

The Commotion Wireless Project is a global, open source development effort that X-Lab director, Sascha Meinrath, has been coordinating since its founding in his living room in 2000. Today, the opportunity exists to create a Commotion for-profit entity that provides a long-term sustainable funding stream for continuing this non-profit initiative. Much as Ubuntu, Mozilla, and Red Hat have done for other open source projects, this effort will help ensure that free, safe communications is available to everyone on the planet.

Circumvention Tech Audit Lab

The Circumvention Tech Audit Lab is a one-stop lab combining capabilities to analyze evolving needs from communities and constituencies around the globe, incubate the development of new circumvention technologies, audit source code to improve existing solutions and improve security, provide a stamp of approval for technologies that pass rigorous testing procedures that help ensure secure communications, distribute these solutions worldwide, and provide legal protection for the users of these services and applications.

PrivWare Lab

The supermajority of today’s “Internet of Things” business models focus on commoditizing an ever-increasing array of private data (from biometrics to food consumption to psychometrics). Sometimes, however, smart is dumb: regardless of the locus of control over personal information, often what we really want are devices that are simply incapable of data collection and information dissemination in the first place. PrivWare is a privacy-centric alternative to the increasingly panoptic “Internet of Things” that places users in control of their devices & data.

Distributed Production Lab

New manufacturing technologies like 3-D printing and distributed production are likely to create the collapse of many facets of the traditional manufacturing chain as they mature over time. The massive disruptions caused by distributed manufacturing will have enormous implications for everything from patents to raw material supply chains, and impact sectors as diverse as transportation, energy, communications and retail.

Smart Infrastructure Policy Lab

A truly intelligent transportation and smart grid system requires everything from a major national fiber buildout, to far-reaching spectrum licensure reforms, to consumer protections over data collection practices. We should take advantages of the synergies between these two (often-siloed) sectors to develop an integrated plan that maximizes the utility of smart infrastructure for the general public.

Tech & Civil Liberties Lab

When technological advances continue occuring faster than we are able to measure the extent of their impact on our civil liberties, our basic human rights and the protections governing these are placed at risk. Leaps forward in processing capacity, communications infrastructure and knowledge transfer should serve as safeguards to our rights and liberties, not threaten them.